Epicenter on Kutaragi: "Games Outgrowing Japan"

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Epicenter on Kutaragi: "Games Outgrowing Japan"

Frank Rose of Wired's business blog Epicenter opines on Ken Kutaragi's exit today, characterizing it as a blow to the Japanese control over the games industry in general:

For Japan, there's something kind of inevitable about all this. InTokyo last summer, as the PS3 was in a state of suspended delivery, it was easy to think the planet revolved around PlayStation. Xbox was relegated to a tiny subsection in the blaring, multi-level electronics stores of Akihabara; Xbox gamers, likewise. But in the rest of the world, Halo just kept getting bigger and bigger. Even Tetsuya Mizuguchi, whose Luminesmusic-puzzle game was a huge hit for the PlayStation Portable, was developing a title exclusively for Xbox 360. Games were outgrowingJapan.

It's a really good piece which you should read in its entirety, but I can't push my chips in with this particular argument. Certainly Xbox 360 is going to be at least as, if not more, relevant than PlayStation 3 in this upcoming generation. And it's true that Japanese development houses have realized that they need to port their next-gen gaming projects across PS3 and 360.

But the game console that could be an even bigger deal and capture the lion's share of the market this generation – Wii – is quite Japanese.

PlayStation 3's competition is twofold. Were it not for Xbox 360, PS3 would be doing significantly better in America. Were it not for Wii, it would be destroying Japan. Getting attacked on two fronts by two very different machines is part of the reason Sony finds itself in such trouble; even if it could make some drastic moves to attack either 360 or Wii, it would leave itself even weaker against the other platform.

If anything, Wii is Japan's savior this console generation, since it means that Japanese games are still going to be relevant and lucrative worldwide. Perhaps even more so, if Japan continues to stay on the cutting edge of innovation with Wii software as they did with Nintendo DS.

That said, I also take issue with the idea that "even" Tetsuya Mizuguchi is making Xbox games. Mizuguchi is a lot of things, but a stoic nationalist Japanese is not one of them. Mizuguchi is a vanguard if not a radical. Of course he'd be one of the first Japanese devs to experiment with Xbox 360. His moves might be indicative of what the industry will do several years later, but he's hardly the example to use if one is trying to prove that all of Japan has shifted their mindset.